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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 




DAVID SWING. 



ART, MUSIC 

AND NATURE 



SELECTIONS FROM THE WRITINGS 



DAVID SWING 

Author of " Truths for To-a'av,'' " Club Essay. 
of Life," Etc. 



Motives 



COMPILED l;V 



M. E. p. :>;>s^ 



"^^ . ^ . . 



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Chicaco : 

SKARLE & CORTOX 

1S93 



^07>7y 






Ci>ivru;ht, 1893 

I'.y MARY E. PRATT 

.-)// >/f/,/A r,-ser7;;/. 



Art, Music and Nature. 



Each art is a golden stairway by which man 
cHmbs up to see his world. 

Art is an effort to express what the mind most 
admires in the world of form. The mind is full of 
images. When the eye is closed, the mind is full 
of scenes the most beautiful, and when the silenCe 
is perfect, then is the heart full of sounds the 
richest. 



HRT, MUSIC HND NATURE. 



Art is an effort to coax the images out of the 
soul and make them material and lasting. Thus 
the canvas, the marbles, and the compositions of 
music are places where the mind sat for its picture. 

The thoughts of some men take the form of 
words. The thoughts of other forms of genius 
take the form of canvas, or music, or marble, and 
leave us to wonder which was the greater, the 
talker or the painter, the Homer of a rich 
language, or the Beethoven and Mendelssohn 
who poured out their feelings in songs without 
words. 



HRT, MUSIC AND NATURE, 



Art being an utterance of the mind, it stands 
related or indebted to religion for many a sacred 
and profound inspiration. Much of Wagner's 
music is sacred because no other department of 
thought offers themes as touching as those which 
come down from the depths of the sky. Wag- 
ner was a genius great enough to show what a 
power his sounds could extract from the land of 
immortality and virtue. 



HRT, MUSIC AND NHTURE. 



The soul feeds upon art until it becomes itself 
an artist. It need not produce creations for the 
public, but only for its own private market. 

Men often weep when they hear pensive 
music, but this comes not because music uttered 
any words to them, but because it has made their 
own spirits become the creators of an eloquence 
all their own. The heart has become itself a 
forum, and its own Cicero, Pericles, or Massillon, 
is declaiming: within. 



ART, MUSIC HND NATURE. 7 



What an artist is man when his own heart 
becomes for him an orator, able to turn the 
silence of a forest into eloquence, and the mid- 



night stars into language. 



All the arts are persuasive, not despotic. The 
woods in spring do not issue decrees for us to 
leave the begrimed city and appear in their 
presence. They silently invite. They grow elo- 
quent without any rude language. For days and 
weeks their influence increases, until at last the 



8 ART, MUSIC AND NHTURE. 



heart breaks every chain, and flies to accept an 
invitation that has no egotism, no office, no 
crown. 

Man is as much a child of the beautiful as he 
is of wisdom or genius. 

Nature never drives us if she can avoid it, 
she prefers to allure us. She makes all things 
charming. She paints the fields and the woods 
that we may go to them led by affection. 



ART, MUSIC AND NATURE. 



Nature makes the face of youth beautiful, 
throws a color on the cheek, and makes the lines 
of smiles and laughter come and go. She sends 
the soul into the eyes that young years may build 
up everlasting friendship. 

Yielding to his divine Master's guidance, man 
follows the beautiful, and to the idea of home, 
or temple, or garden, or city he comes with both 
hands full of ornament. He claims for his house 
and his dress what God gives to the peach, or 
the leaf, or the rose. 

In this deep philosophy, music comes as a 
decoration of a thought. Man submits his truths 



10 ART, MUSIC AND NHTURl 



to several steps of this ennobling work. He 
found them in prose, and he asks Milton, or 
Dante, or Tennyson, or Longfellow, to frame 
them into poetry ; but not satisfied yet, he takes 
the thought to the musician, and asks Mozart, 
or Weber, or Schubert, to pour still more color 
on the blessed truths. 

It was not enough for the Greeks that some 
of their truth took the poetic form of the drama, 
it must also be sung on the stage, so that be- 
tween the uplifted hands of both poetry and 



ART. MUSIC AND NATURE. 11 



music, all might see how sorrowful was CEdipus 
or how sweet Antigone. 

Thus all through its history, music has been 
the final decoration of a sentiment. 

Poetry has done much when it has gathered 
up some of the pensive meditations of man, and 
has called the rhythmical arrangement a poem. 
Even read to us, its iiow of harmonious feet is 
impressive, but when Mozart goes farther, and 
wreathes those words with his composition, and 
calls it a requiem, then is the cup of our real- 



12 ART, iVLUSrC AND NATURE. 



ization full, and all the pomp and splendor of 
earth sink like the summer sun. 

Music is the art that comes to Christianity 
with all its measureless power. If we could not 
answer atheism with argument, we could smother 
it with music. It is the ally of the pulpit; it is 
one of the forms of God's spirit. Inseparable 
friend of civilized man! Nearer to his soul than 
his libraries, or his sciences, or his commerce — 
for in infancy his mother lulls him to sleep 
with song, and, about to die, while body and 



ART, MUSIC HND NATURE. 13 



heart are failing, he requests that the nearest 
friends will sing some well known hymn ; and 
often the heart, bidding earth farewell, selects 
the music that shall burst forth over its own 
coffin-lid. 

Thus are we lulled to sleep by music at the 
beginning and the ending of this world. 

}klusic! Whence came this form of the beau- 
tiful, and whither does it tend? The evolutionists 
would assure us that the love of harmonious sounds 



14 HRT, MUSIC AND NATURE. 



is a passion that has been created by a friction of 
atoms and energies, and by a natural selection, 
and by a survival of the fittest sounds that have 
been taking place for millions of years; but true 
as evolution is, in certain limits, the best descent 
that reason can find for this strange art is a 
descent from an all wise God. The Creator 
bound up the sentiment of music in the soul 
of man. 

Evolution and selection may do much and 
explain much, but when upon a summer morning 



ART, MUSIC AND NATURE. 15 



we hear a robin sin*; upon the highest branch of a 
blossoming apple tree, and when a few hours after 
we hear the morning hymn coming out of the win- 
dows of a church among the trees, we must ask all 
the laws of progress to step back for the moment, 
and make room for God. 

?^Iusic is one of God's gifts to his children 
for their culture and hajipiness. As God gave 
man reason and imaginati(Mi, memory and love, 
so He gave man the power tc^ L'njoy certain torms 



16 ART, MUSIC RND NATURE. 



of sound — an inexplicable, ultimate sentiment in 
the soul. 

i\Ian is clothed, evidently, with certain divine 
attributes which the brute world does not possess. 
The brute will trample underfoot unseen, a flower 
which a child will run wildly to possess, and the 
delicate perfume which would n(^t be detected 
by an animal is leathered up with o-ladness by 
man. 

The beast of prey can scent afar the blood 
of its natural food, can even follow the old track 



ART, MUSIC AND NATURE. 17 



of its victim, but cannot perceive the best per- 
fume of Arabia, nor the aroma of a sea-wind. 

Man alone reveals a power to discern the 
beautiful. The universe around him is not only 
immense in its sizes and distances, but it is grand 
in its beauty. The star distances amaze the 
human heart. It grows silent and thoughtful 
when it learns that some suns are so far away 
that their light consumes six thousand years in 
coming to our planet. 



18 ART, MUSIC AND NATURE. 



The heart grows silent and meditative when 
it looks out upon the Atlantic or Pacific Sea. 

When the flowers all burst forth in the spring, 
and when they are all fading in autumn, this 
strange soul marks within itself the spiritual flow 
and ebb of delight and regret, and when the 
thunder rolls, or the pine trees moan, or the birds 
sine, or the tones of voice or instrument send 
forth their vibrations, this human and mysterious 
power asserts itself and stands as happy and 



HRT, MUSIC RND NfiTURE. 19 



blessed in the world of sounds as it was a mo- 
ment ago in the world of color and perfume. 

Of this sentiment of the beautiful, we can 
only say that it is an ultimate quality of man, 
one of the images of God in which he was 
fashioned when the Creator said, ' ' Let us make 
man in our own image. " Once set forth on its 
career it enters the schoolhouse like a child, and 
begins with its simple lessons. 



50 HRT, MUSIC AND NATURE. 



Our earth repeats in all its departments the 
law of infancy and youth and middle life and 
mature age, with this difference, that arts and 
institutions do not grow old and die. All our 
arts pass through an alphabet, and the school- 
house, and the shop of the apprentice, but they 
do not, like man, fall into a grave. 



Architecture at first was only an infant; it 
could build only a hut. So drawing and paint- 
ing were once blundering apprentices; and music 
was in the outset of its history only a monotone 



ART, MUSIC RND NATURE. 21 



with the voice, and its second lesson was to 
rise to the accompaniment of a drum, or two 
strings tightly drawn. But the similitude between 
an art and an individual ends here, for when 
each one of us shall fall into our grave the arts 
we loved will pass on only improved by the lapse 
of years. 

It should be an argument for immortality — 
the thought that a kind Creator will not sepa- 
rate the soul forever from these high pursuits and 
pleasures, but will in a second world waken man 



22 HRT. MUSIC AND NATURE. 



to a new appreciation of the forms and sounds 
that gave such pure happiness here. Not only 
may the soul base its hope upon that kindness 
of God which will permit separated families and 
friends to meet hereafter, but also upon the 
benevolence which will call up the heart from its 
grave to resume again its experiences of the 
manifold beautv here seen only in outline. Many 
and great are the reasons for the belief that man 
dying here will waken to a higher life. 

We need not pursue farther the inquiry, 
Whence came the stream of sweet sound? It 



ART. MUSIC AND NATURE. 23 



began in that benevolence and wisdom of God 
which bestowed upon man the power to perceive 
and produce and love the beautiful; and having 
begun, the power has grown as the world has 
grown, and at last music ranks highest of the 
beautiful arts, unless we call literature an art. 
An art is to be estimated by its power, not only 
in an\' one person, but amid the multitude, and 
following such a method of judgment, painting, 
sculpture and architecture fall far behind this 
one form of sentiment — the sentiment of sounds, 

A few may confess their partiality to painting 
or statuary; indeed, some are music-deaf as others 



24 HRT, MUSIC AND NATURE. 



are color-blind; but looking at the human family, 
the delight and pathos of music is almost 
universal. 

Music is the art which holds all m its spell. 
The fables about Orpheus, how. when he played 
upon his instrument, the very trees listened, 
and the wild beasts came to hear and laid 
aside their ferocity, are only efforts of literature 
to tell how powerful this form of the beautiful 



ART, MUSIC HND NATURE. 25 



has always been. Long before the modern 
penetration had said, "Let me make the songs 
of a nation, and I shall not care who makes its 
laws," Plato had said, "If you would know 
whether a state is well governed, you must look 
into the condition of its music." 

Not only is this the fine art which reaches 
the largest number, but the art which touches 
the heart the most quickly and the most deeply. 



26 fiRT, MUSIC HND NATURE. 



Painting and sculpture and architecture are 
quiet forms of the beautiful compared with music. 
It is said to be the only one of the arts that can 
draw tears. 

When the ancients wished to tell how pow- 
erful were lute and voice, they had to resort to 
fancy, that the colors of the pictures might be 
gorgeous enough to be truthful. 

When Orpheus played upon his lyre, the 
heart of Pluto relented and Eurydice escaped, 
the wheel of Ixion stopped, the vultures ceased 



HRT, MUSIC AND NATURE. 27 



to torment Tytyas, and the thirst of Tantalus 
was forgotten, and the goddess of death forgot 
to go to earth to caH away the infant or the 



aged from sweet hfe. 



What Ulysses and his companions found it 
most difficult to contend against was not the 
billows of the sea nor the breakers of Charybdis, 
but the song of the sirens. 

Hesiod says that when these two sisters sang, 
the winds paused to catch the strain, and that 



28 ART, MUSIC AND NATURE. 



the sea made music because those sisters, when 
heartbroken, cast themselves into its waves. 
Of no other art does the imagination speak with 
such extravagance. 

Our epoch casts out from its speech these 
forms of fable, but in its more quiet eloquence, 
the eulogy goes on without any abatement. 
Luther declared music to be the most magnifi- 
cent present "God had given to mankind." 
Mirabeau said, "Let me die amid sounds of sweet 
music. " Richter said, ' 'Childhood comes back when 
we hear music," and then again in his sorrow he 
says reproachfully, "Away! Away! oh music, for 



ART, MUSIC AND NATURE. 29 



thou speakest to me of things which I shall 
never find in this world." 



The mighty brain of Napoleon, whatever may 
be said about his heart, gave us this decision: 
"Of all the liberal arts, music has the greatest 
influence over the emotions, and is the art to 
which the lawmaker should give great attention. " 
Addison said, "It is almost all we have of 
Heaven on earth. " Thus, in this eulogy there is 
no intermission. 

Be the speaker Egyptian, or Greek, or German, 
or Englishman, be he philosopher, or lover, or 



10 ART, MUSIC AND NATURE. 



statesman, or theologian, — all follow one strain 
with amazing unanimity. The love of light and 
flowers is not more universal. 

Such is the art which long ago was made the 
favorite friend and child of Christianity, issuing 
out of that nation which brought from old Egypt 
a many-stringed harp, from that nation whose 
daughters could not sing their joyful songs in a 
strange land, but who hung their instruments 
upon willows and wept ; issuing from that nation 



RRT, MUSIC AND NATURE. 31 



whose mission was religious, and whose temple 
echoed for centuries with a vast chorus, chanting 
psalms. Christianity dismissed the Mosaic rites 
and law, but detained the song, A Christ could 
supersede an artificial ceremony, but He could 
not displace a hymn — the one was Mosaic, the 
other was the eternal human. 

In the Roman Catholic ages this divine music 
went forward. In all else opinion could change 
and dogmas were set up and torn down, but the 



32 ART, MUSIC HHD NHTURE. 



hymn and the instrument went forward when all 
else went backward or stood still. 

The harp turned into a piano; the little instru- 
ments, blown by human breath, turned into the 
orgjan; and the bass voice of Luther ceased to 
be opposed, and was welcomed as a new element 
in harmony. 

In no one century of the Christian era was the 
high art of music in its instrum.ental or vocal forms 
brought to a sudden perfection, but from the 



ART, MUSIC HND NATURE. 33 



very first morning when the shepherds heard 
music in the Bethlehem air, has this beautiful 
language of religion been enlarging its borders. 



One might feel that the Italian and German 
genius of modern times had created this world of 
tune, did we not read in St. Jerome's writings in 
the fifth century that he had seen an organ 
whose music could be heard a thousand steps. 
INIany similar allusions must lead to the con- 
clusion that Italy and Germany have only given 



34 HRT, iVLUSlC HND NHTURE. 



immense impulse to a sentiment already deep 
and powerful. 

Wherein lies the spiritual power of this con- 
cord of sweet sounds ? Mark this, that the chief 
defect in the soul is its natural inability to realize 
the scene in which it lives out its days upon 
earth. The Indian cannot measure life or death, 
love or friendship, or honor or charity. All these 
nobler things lie far above him. Thus were we 
all once by nature. Man was blind and deaf 



ART, MUSIC HND NATURE. 35 



and dumb in the midst of a divine world. But 
by degrees he has risen upward in all his faeulties, 
and at last he has come to some sense, though 
still inadequate, of the tremendous surroundings. 
All the mysteries of life and death have grown 
upon him. Childhood and old age have become 
thrilling spectacles. Once only dead facts, they 
have expanded until they lie out before us like 
the ocean. 

These are only two specimens selected from 
an array of impressive ideas scattered over human 



36 HRT, MUSIC AND NHTURE. 



life. This want of realization being the first 
great weakness of man, all the fine arts have 
come as higher angels to pull him up out of the 
pit; and music appears as the exaltation of a truth 
until the dull eye shall see it, and the sleeping 
spirit feel its reality. 

What influenced Angelo was not a statue 
alone, not painting alone, nor all these arts, for 
he was a poet, and in all ways an intellectual 
giant. The statue, rising up out of falling chips. 



ART, MUSIC AND NATURE. 37 



was to him an emblem of the soul rising amid 
the influences of the world's hammer. 



Angelo wrote: 

'• The good is but evolved by Time's dread blows ; 
The vile shall, day by day, 
Fall like superfluous dust away. 
Thus, take whatever bonds my spirit knows, 
And reason, virtue, power, within me lay." 



A great awakening had dawned before Angelo 
came, and thus the age gave him more than 



33 HRT, MUSIC HND MATURE. 



sculptor's art, gave him the power to see in his 
marble images the spiritual side of humanity. 
The picture, the statue, the columns and arches 
were only the external expressions of great truths 
and thoughts. 

In the art of that period we can note that a 
great religion was surrounding all these workers, 
and that the culture of the classic age was 
forming a union with the higher religion that had 
come from Judea. 

It would be a great loss to the heart if truth 
was limited to only the decorations of the four 



ART, MUSIC AND NHTURE. 39 



great arts. Architecture can utter a few words 
only in the name of rehgion; the sculptor only a 
few; the painter only a few. Music can say 
more than any sister art; but, after all the musi- 
cians have used their many tones, much still 
remains unexpressed, and the mighty ideas of 
religion must look to still other forms of language. 



The language of the three material arts is 
small when compared with that language the 
mind and heart can speak through words and 
actions. 



40 ART, MUSIC AND NATURE 



What can architecture, sculpture, or painting 
do for our children, or say to them? Can these 
arts see them wake in the morning to find what 
the reindeer and sleigh may have brought them 
in the night? 

Can the common arts laugh and play with 
the young? Can they rear an evergreen tree and 
make it bear rich gifts? 

Can the sonatas or the orchestras build a 
Christmas fire? The artists and orators from Paul 
to Angelo left much unsaid. Man's religion is 
greater than all the old fine arts. 



RRT, MUSIC HND KflTURE. 41 



Modern art is drawing nearer its divine guide, 
and is making the beautiful join forces with the 
true. 

Beauty, to all those who think the world came 
from a God, is only the dimly expressed wish of 
that God; and man is to find it and love it. 
Man is to carry it forward. He must not distort 
it, he must kindle into a flame the smoking flax, 
and bind up the broken reed. 

Nature begins, man continues. 



42 ART, MUSIC AND NATURE, 



Art is not simply man's sense of the beautiful, 
it is also an expression of his wisdom, that 
thought which guards the education and happiness 
of the soul. 

When we have listened to music or seen the 
great in art, we have not simply enjoyed the 
gratifications of the sense of happiness, but we 
have been upon a moral height where the air is 
purer than the common air, and where there are 
more distinct traces of a God. 



HRT, MUSIC END NATURE. 43 



Moses is said to have gone up into a moun- 
tain to receive the laws of the Ahiiighty, and 
catch gHmpses of a glory not visible in the vale. 
And then his human face, hardened by cares and 
storms, became brilliant as the halo of a saint. 

Thus art is a withdrawal of man from the 
valley, and a leading of him up into a holier 
height where there is not simple beauty of form 
or sound, l)ut where there is an elevation of mind 
and spirit which no other power can bring. 



44 HRT, MUSIC RND NATURE 



The beautiful becomes only a gate of pearl, 
that opens to the good. 

Art is not an embodiment of beauty alone, 
but it is a path, which leads man up into the 
mountain where the highest intellect communes 
with the infinite goodness and greatness of God. 



Each great work of any art is only a child 
of wisdom justifying that bosom from which it 
sprang. 



fiRT MUSIC RND NATURE. 45 



Art is not a carving and a painting of all the 
objects living or dead upon earth, but a selection 
of those forms which carry within, all that ought 
to be immortal; so the iield of each one must not 
be the mad chaos of human life in its vices and 
crimes and passions, on the ground that it takes 
all kinds of people to make a world, but rather 
the world of each must be detached from the 
realistic chaos, and be composed of goodness and 
beauty alone. 

It takes all kinds of people to make a bad 
world; a good world is composed with the omis- 



46 ART, MUSIC AND NflTUR] 



sion of many varieties of person. As a man filters 
muddy water before he drinks it, so must he filter 
the world for his spirit. 

Nothing can lead the young up into noble- 
ness but a relationship to a world greater than 
themselves. 

Many are born with certain great impulses 
within, and these would not be total failures even 
though their lot were cast in some lonely island. 



P.R7. MUSIC AND NHTURE. 47 



but these gifted ones, and much more all others, 
need to be drawn out and upward by external 
hands, because in any young bosom there are 
only the forces of a brief day upon earth, whereas 
the world contains the momentum of many thou- 
sands of years. 

The average mind comes into life with a taste 
for music, and if left to itself it might hum a few 
notes or draw a string tightly and touch it with 
the finger; but when this mind falls into a world 



48 ART, MUSIC AND NATURE. 



of music, a world swept over by the waves from 
Mozart, Beethoven, and a grand army of such 
creators, these external hands lift up the incoming 
soul, and the girl of twenty plays harmonies it 
took earth many ages to produce. 

The noblest man or woman will be that one 
who always sees the world in the highest light. 

Our galleries are not to be full of the pictures 
of the African bushman and of cannibals slaying 



ART, MUSIC AND NATURE. 49 



and eating a captive, but art stands amid real- 
ities as an eclectic, and selects those facts which 
awaken emotions the noblest. 

Ananias and Sapphira were as real as Christ 
and Mary, but art did not open to receive their 
faces as quickly as it opened to admit the 
Madonna and Jesus. 

The true realism must be that which from 
an infinite collection of actualities, selects those 



50 ART, MUSIC HND NATURE. 



which become an inspiration of the mind and a 
pure pleasure of the soul. 

That world which is the field for art is not 
each ugly square inch of the human past, present 
and future, but it is all of earth that can add to 
the power of the mind, and to the power and 
purity of the heart. 

It must not be a matter of complaint that not 
all can be painters, or architects, or sculptors, or 



ART, MUSIC AND NATURE. 51 



poets. These names stand for only the most 
exterior and most marketable goods in the king- 
dom of beauty. 

The man or woman who can do good deeds, 
the person whose character inspires, whose smile 
cheers, whose hand leads, whose presence blesses 
like a sunbeam, is an artist, because in this one, 
the theory of the human race steps forth in ///}•,, 
like the statue of Pygmalion. 



52 ART, MUSIC AND NHTURE. 



Powerful as all the fine arts are, tney have 
been dumb when compared with the words of 
friendship and praise with which man has cheered 



man along the world. 



A soul surrounded by noble friendships is more 
blessed than a soul surrounded by the creations 
of genius. Henry Thoreau attempted to live 
alone. Philosophy was to be his friend, nature 
his beauty, the birds and winds were to supply 
him with music, and the clouds with dreams. 



ART, MUSIC RND NATURE. 53 



But in a few seasons an awful want sprang up. 
This want could not be met by any morning bird 
song, not by any blossoms of spring, not by any 
fruits of autumn, not by any sighing of the pines, 
nor by a colored sunset; the heart asked for the 
inspiration that comes from human life; and the 
poor hermit had to run back to where he could 
walk the path of existence hand in hand with 
humanity. 

All the charms around the little cabin in the 
woods were real and great, but they were dumb 



54 HRT, MUSIC AND NATURE. 



beauties compared with the many-sided eloquence 
of mankind. 

Henry D. Thoreau did not want to go back 
to the world's furniture, its raiment, its luxury, 
its gold, but he wished to return to its refined 
and sympathetic soul. Its language was far above 
the language of the birds; its smile was better 
than the smile of the sea; its tears of joy or 
grief, more touching than the million dewdrops 
on the branch or vine. 



HRT, MUSIC AND NATURE. 55 



If human life is like a fine art, it must be 
advancing with uniform and gentle stepping. 

You cannot wait for the uprising of the reli- 
gions of our race, you must live out your life 
now. To-day and to-morrow — and you are gone! 
Fill to the brim the urn of your own life. Your 
soul must express itself. Its love, its sympathy, 
its benevolence, its honors, must burst their shell 
and find in this short season a springtime for 



56 HRT, MUSIC HND NHTURE. 



blossoming. Man's works are his most visible 
destiny. To these he repairs with his deepest 
thought and noblest passion, and it is while he 
is busy at these, God meets him, and transfers 
to paradise the servant so faithful upon earth. 

True beauty lies nearer to civilization and hap- 
piness than wealth lies. All hearts move to its 
music. The coming spring already charms; be- 
yond that lies the summer; beyond the summer, 
the colored leaves of autumn. 



ART, MUSIC AND NATURE. 57 



According to Socrates, and all after him, from 
Victor Cousin and John Ruskin, all this pageantry 
of loveliness, from a rose to a madonna face, is 
only the picture of a moral excellence, and points 
to God and a divine Christ. 



The heavens are a suggestion of a great 
Creator, while each lily contains the qualities of 
a Christ. Every note of good music leads the 
mind away from sound, far up to thought, to 
rich memory and precious hope. 



58 ART, MUSIC AND NATURE. 



Music and nature never end in themselves; 
they lead man up to a still greater height than 
their own. 

The whole true beauty of earth is a flowing 
river which is to carry us all along toward a 
world and a life more beautiful still, where the 
imperfect passes up toward perfection, and the 
mortal is cast upward into immortality. 



ART, MUSIC AND NATURE. 59 



As Beethoven looked into music, pondered 
over it, slept near it, dreamed of it, until at last 
it ran on in beauty in his creative mind, even 
after he could no longer hear its notes, so all 
ideas grow in the heart, where, having been 
once welcomed, they are turned over in their 
many attractive lights. 

The highest form of human life will always 
be found where the highest truths are stimulating 
the highest feelings. 



60 ART, MUSIC HND NHTURE, 



Inspire us again! Cause man and God to 
pass before us in greatness. Lead us from the 
baptism of water to that of living fire. Make 
our hearts forever young, and our world forever 
new. 

That music is dearest which carries man 
away from his poverty, his ignorance, his shop, 



ART, MUSIC HND NATURE. 61 



even his guilty conscience, and makes him a 
citizen of the universe. 

Ethics is its own reward. Each good deed 
pays for itself instantly. As in music, the hap- 
piness comes with the tone, with the striking of 
the string, the hearer being at once in his heaven; 
so in morals a Christ-like deed is instantly a joy. 

It need not fear hell, nor wait for heaven. It 
is the instantaneous music of the heart. 



62 ART, MUSIC AND NATURE. 



Wisdom's ways are those along which the 
form of God has just passed, the great roseate 
band on the horizon along which Dante saw 
passing in beautiful triumph, the chariot of our 
Lord. 

The story that Mozart died while listening to 
the impressive requiem almost leads to the belief 
that a harpsichord contains the philosophy of a 



ART. MUSIC AND NRTURE. 63 



happy life and a happy death; but the fact is 
omitted that much of Mozart's music drew its 
sweetness from the worship of God, and the 
requiem itself was a structure which reposed 
wholly upon the Christian's faith. 

Instead of being an end, beauty acted only 
as a language for man's trust in his Creator. If 
jMozart helped the sanctuary, the sanctuary helped 
Mozart. 



64 ART, MUSIC AND NATURE. 



The church supphed the thoughts which genius 
expressed in melody. This is the art that comes 
to Christianity with all its measureless power. 

"Music, oh how faint, how weak 

Language seems before thy spell I 
Why should feeling-ever speak 

When thou canst breathe her soul so well ?" 

The true genius of the pencil, or the chisel, 
or of poetry, spends a part of life in loving study 



ART. MUSIC AND NATURE. 65 



of the out-door world ; and then in some room 
with four walls and only a little light streaming 
in at some opening, all contrived and built by 
poverty, to be rented to a deeper poverty, com- 
bines and creates, and paints or carves, until 
there comes forth the ideal face, carrying the 
artist and the beholder far up toward the per- 
fections of some better world. All he asked of 
the senses was that they should give him a help- 

5 



66 ART, MUSIC AND NATURE, 



ing hand in early life, afterward he could create 
worlds for himself. 

Man is essentially a mental being. He is not 
of earth nor for earth. All efforts to make him 
a creature of sense have resulted in his ruin. 

Fasten him to earth and he becomes a glut- 
ton, or a drunkard, or an animal ; but detach 
him, leave him to his thoughts, and he becomes 
a philosopher, or a poet, or a writer, or an 
orator, or some form of divinity. 



ART, MUSIC AND NATURE. 67 



What is abstract beauty here will become the 
reality of a second world ; and the place where 
the mind is freed from all humbler pursuits, and 
their penalties in tears, and sorrow, and death 
— that will be heaven. 

THE END. 



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